LOS ANGELES — Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley millionaire, rose to fame by promoting a ballot initiative that essentially eliminated bilingual education in California. He went on to become publisher of The American Conservative, a libertarian-leaning magazine.
But after decades in the conservative movement, Mr. Unz is pursuing a goal that has stymied liberals: raising the minimum wage. He plans to pour his own money into a ballot measure to increase the minimum wage in California to $10 an hour in 2015 and $12 in 2016, which would make it by far the highest in the nation. Currently, it is $8 — 75 cents higher than the federal minimum.
Using what he sees as conservative principles to advocate a policy long championed by the left, Mr. Unz argues that significantly raising the minimum wage would help curb government spending on social services, strengthen the economy and make more jobs attractive to American-born workers.
"There are so many very low-wage workers, and we pay for huge social welfare programs for them," he said in an interview. "This would save something on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Doesn't it make more sense for employers to pay their workers than the government?"
Mr. Unz plans to submit the ballot language to the California secretary of state on Tuesday, declaring his intention to gather enough signatures to place it on the ballot in 2014.
Labor union leaders and top Democrats in the state said they were not aware of the plan, though Mr. Unz said he would welcome their help.
President Obama has called for raising the federal minimum wage to $9 from $7.25, but has received little support from Congress.
"At the very least, this is a way to capture the attention of people and have a debate," Mr. Unz said.
Mr. Unz has spent nearly $1 million on previous ballot measures and said he was prepared to spend some of his own fortune on this initiative as well. He added, though, that he expected the cost to be "minimal" because he anticipates widespread support.
But businesses would almost certainly spend to defeat the measure.
Earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed legislation to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour in 2016. The California Chamber of Commerce labeled the bill a "job killer" and said that such a large increase would raise the unemployment rate and put the state's precarious economic recovery at risk. A spokeswoman for the group declined to comment on Mr. Unz's proposal on Monday.
Mr. Unz brushes aside such criticism, saying the size of California's economy — which, at roughly $1.9 trillion, is bigger than most countries' — would prevent any large-scale movement of jobs to other states. Instead, he argues, it presents the best test case for the kind of national minimum wage increase he has advocated for years.
National polls suggest raising the minimum wage is popular, and Mr. Unz said he believed such a measure would pass easily in California, where an estimated 1.6 million residents earn less than $10 an hour. But it could cost millions to gather the nearly 750,000 signatures needed to get it on the ballot.
Mr. Unz entered politics in 1994 as a challenger to Gov. Pete Wilson for the Republican nomination, at one point accusing Mr. Wilson of being a closet Democrat. After his ballot measure against bilingual education passed in 1998 — he argued that such education kept students from learning English effectively and forced children to stay with other speakers of their native language — Mr. Unz backed similar successful measures in Arizona and Massachusetts. He became publisher of The American Conservative in 2007, writing opinion articles on the minimum wage, immigration and urban crime.
He left that post this year amid what he said were "ideological and administrative" differences. Officials at the magazine declined to comment.
Mr. Unz wrote in the magazine last year that manufacturing "sweatshops" that rely on immigrant workers, including those in the country illegally, were among the few industries that would be devastated by a higher minimum wage. "There's a legitimate argument to be made that those kinds of businesses have no place in our economy," he said, "and getting rid of them would eliminate the low-rung jobs that bring in new poor immigrants."
Mr. Unz also argues that increasing the minimum wage would help eliminate what he calls an education bubble: More people are taking on huge debt to attend college, even though they may not be able to find a high-paying job afterward. If the floor of low-wage jobs is raised, he says, more people will find such jobs attractive.
While unions have backed similar voter initiatives in San Jose and Long Beach, Calif., labor officials are now focused on permanently tying the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, and said the measure Mr. Unz is proposing could be a distraction. Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation, was hardly enthusiastic when informed of Mr. Unz's plans.
"He has not shown a great deal of support for workers' issues in the past and was nowhere to be seen in the legislative debate here, so it's not really clear what the motivation is here," Mr. Smith said. "But he is saying some things that are the same as what we've been saying all along."
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